Conferences

Here are two forthcoming conferences that I am co-organizing with Philippe Michel this year:

(1) Quite soon, the traditional Number Theory Days (the eleventh edition of this yearly two-day meeting that alternates between EPF Zürich and ETH Lausanne), will be held in Zürich on March 7 and 8; the web page is available, with the schedule and the titles of the talks; the speakers this year are Raf Cluckers (who is also giving a Nachdiplomvorlesung at FIM on the topic of motivic integration and applications), Lillian Pierce, Trevor Wooley, Tamar Ziegler and (Tamar is probably happily surprised not to come last in alphabetical order!) David Zywina.
Anyone interested in participating should send an email to Mrs Waldburger as soon as possible (see the web page for the address).

(2) In July, intersecting neatly the last stages of the soccer world cup, and beginning in the middle of a week to avoid (thanks to some fancy footwork) starting on the 14th of July, we organize a summer school on analytic number theory at I.H.É.S; people interested in participating should follow the instructions on the web site. The detailed programme will soon be available.

Alas, poor Yorick…

Je suis de passage, presque par hasard, ce soir à Paris, et je viens de lire que Patrice Chéreau est mort. Il y a peu d’occasions dont je me souvienne aussi vivement que d’avoir vu sa mise en scène de Hamlet, il y a longtemps, à Grenoble — “Good night, sweet prince // And flights of angels sing thee to thy rest!”

Fouvry 60

We are currently enjoying in Marseille the warmth and delights of a French Mediterranean Bouillabaisse while celebrating analytic number theory and the achievements of É. Fouvry, on the occasion of his 60th birthday.

I think everyone who has been in contact with any of his papers has immense respect for his scientific work. All those of us who have been fortunate enough to talk with him beyond purely scientific matters will also attest to his exemplary intellectual honesty, rectitude, generosity and — also important to my mind — to his sense of humor.

In analytic number theory, we play day to day in a wild down-to-earth jungle. We also all know that somewhere there is a Garden of Eden, where the Riemann Hypothesis roams free, and we hope to go there one day. Fewer know that there is a place even beyond, a Nirvana where even the Riemann Hypothesis is but a shadow of a deeper truth. And fewer still are those who have set foot in this special place. É. Fouvry did, and he was among the very first ones, if not the very first; and more people have walked on the moon than been there.

A few years ago, I wrote a nominating letter for Étienne’s application to the Institut Universitaire de France. There is one sentence that I wrote which still seems to me to summarize best my feelings about this part of his work: Rarely in history was so much owed by so many arithmeticians to so few. This is even truer today than it was then. Reader, if you care at all about prime numbers, recall that without É. Fouvry and very few others (two of whom are with us in Marseille), you might well never have known that the gaps between successive primes do not grow to infinity.

À la…

A few months ago, I wondered what could be the largest cluster of foreign words in the Oxford English Dictionary, citing the examples of femme something-or-other and sympathique and company. It turns out that there is a much larger one! Here is the à la cluster:

à la 1579
à la bonne heure 1750
à la broche 1806
à la brochette 1821
à la carte 1816
à la crème 1741
à la débandade 1779
à la fourchette 1817
à la Française 1589
à la modality 1753
à la mode 1637
à-la-modeness 1669
à la mort 1536
à la page 1930
à la roi 1852
à la royale 1853
à la Russe 1775
à la Turquie 1676

That’s no less than 18 items (the date on the right is the first OED citation). It’s interesting that so many have to do with food, and even more that three or four are basically synonyms of “in fashion” (this is what à la page basically means). I have to admit to being partial to à-la-modeness for its translanguage qualities, although I don’t know if I will be able to use it intelligently anytime soon (though one never knows; after all, I did manage to sneak ptarmigan in a recent paper…)

A missing word

From the blog of the rare books collection of the ETH Library, I just learnt that the word for the study and classification of grape species that I was looking for is “ampelography” (ampélographie in French).

(The relevance of this word to my daily life is that the computers on my home network are named after grapes; red grapes are reserved for desktops and white for laptops.)